April 3, 2018 at 10:43General cleaning in the company: how we turned stores
In the last post, I talked about how we were surprised to find that we became such a big fat company, and at the same time they grabbed all the features of bureaucracy. It was urgent to refactor and become effective again. Below is what we did in retail. I must say right away that for many, the post will cause a desire to argue, because I will be extremely cynical.
Let's start with this picture. On Kursk near the point homeless people wound up. And they became the face of the company for several days. The elder did not know what to do, and wanted to consult with a lawyer. In our "good old" model, he would first do something with them, and then he would tell.
Homeless people lived near the store for a couple of weeks. This is a direct exit from the metro, so they were warm and comfortable there. It was decided that as soon as the door opened, the employee took thick rubber gloves, and either directly brought them out to the street, or had a conversation with him about why they interfere. If they had time to lie down for at least 2 minutes, that would suit them perfectly. And when they didn’t give 10 seconds, well, the direction of migration has shifted.
In fact, of course, this was the lesser of the problems. And the most easily solved.
For the store to work, you need to do three basic things:
A. Choose a location. A good place is when the store goes to zero due to the conversion of the stream, and everything else already depends on how you attract new people. In places we have good competence, but there were problems with franchisees partners. Specifically, despite the described methodology and testing according to formal criteria, they several times at the beginning of 2017 managed to choose places where we ourselves would never get up. These are either really sweet spots with too high rents, or places in shopping centers where everything is good in the forecast numbers, but in practice, there’s some kind of dead end at the end of the floor. Each place is now checked according to the new procedure with special care.
B. Track assortment. In short, there were two hypotheses:
The first works great in consumer demand such as grocery. Or when the same washing powder is replaced. The problem is that we only had data sets of this type. Now we know that the second scenario works for us. So, in 2017 it was necessary to restore the range, and do it pretty quickly.
And the assortment was a mess. Previously, the buyer simply took the goods and dragged them to the company, carrying out some input filtering. During the crisis, buyers have acquired an excellent skill to take everything that they think will be profitable to sell. As a result, we even got electric scooters. In the top sales for one of the months came a fidget cube. It became unclear what exactly we are selling. At the same time, many positions of hardcore desktops were not purchased, because suppliers, for example, put priority on margins, and not on the quality of the goods. And this is not the only reason.
Normal guys have an assortment manager - a person who decides what to buy accurately, even if there is no advantageous position in the market, and what exactly cannot be taken, even if it is three times gold. There was such a post. I would also talk about this separately, there is a whole world with its own special atmosphere.
We have got quite a lot of competitors on the Internet with low prices. We could contrast them with efficiency on huge volumes - with the same taxes we have strictly. The result is a revision of prices for key goods for which there are additional purchases in the same check - at Monopoly, for example, we earn almost nothing.
B. The third component of the store is normal service.Normal is when you left the store in a better mood than you entered. Even if you didn’t buy it. This is when the seller is not poher. This is when they open you fucking boxes. This is when they help a person, and not vparivat. This is the foundation of the basics.
And we also hired Inessa to manage retail. Inessa is a terminator person. All the sellers hated her amicably. Why? Because she began to clean up. From her we learned the scale of the fluffy polar fox that was going on in retail.
One of the episodes: Karina and Inessa hired a man who had been calculating casino and bar schemes all his life. He could say for 10 minutes watching the bartender how much he steals per shift. And this beautiful guy drove through all our points for the purpose of economic intelligence. The report was impressive: after it, you could safely lose faith in people. From examples - once sellers scored on a client and sat in the back room in a crowd at rush hour. Someone was stealing. In Yekaterinburg, signals came that sellers were leaving earlier than the end of the shift. We put video surveillance. The eldest and three sellers immediately quit. We were in cognitive dissonance, because the scope of operations and the number of people employed in them was amazing. Having appreciated the scale of what is happening, we began a great purge.
It was impossible to take and surrender to the labor market those who were pierced. But such micromanagement smacks of dangerous idiocy and nepotism. It was much better to build an ecosystem that would automatically select the right sellers. Since we still changed the management of retail and processes (let me remind you, we divided from one large company into a group of companies by directions), there was an opportunity to change the working scheme of stores. Specifically - motivation.
People generally go to work either for money to eat, or because it's cool there. “Cool” can be of three types and rests against the Maslow pyramid, which is already specifically rumpled from frequent use. Well, or the theory of characters of players from gamification.
The old payment scheme was as follows: 2/3 of the salary is a salary, about a third are bonuses for sales (collective, shift). This worked great while the control chain was short, and we could visit our stores at least once a month. A few years later it turned out that few people understood how salaries are generally considered. And if it is not clear how salary is considered, then it is not clear how work affects it. Therefore, the new scheme is as follows:
While it is important that if you are a seller, then your salary directly depends on how efficiently the store as a whole works and the change of seller.
After two weeks of screaming and moaning and a chain of dismissals on our own, we sincerely surprised to learn that they were still stealing from us. And not only goods, but also time. Specifically - it often happened that the senior "checked" the seller on schedule, but he did not go out. But he received a salary during this time.
Our decision then was extremely banal - coordination of schedules on the central retail node. So, as we know from network architecture, this idea with the growth of the network becomes complete garbage. We have become. The new scheme made it possible to shift the decision to the senior seller of the point, and so that he simply can not choose an ineffective solution - this is his money! This automatically meant that if 4 sellers came to replace Mega on Monday, they would all suck their paws, because there were very few buyers at that time. And if 2 sellers take the shift on Saturday, then again everyone will suck their paw, because the store could make more sales on the stream, but did not reach the percentage of the plan. This ecological balance at first seemed very fragile to us, but tests showed that people quickly learn to count their money.
Another problem could arise - the propensity for tactics instead of strategy. That is, the desire to steam, it seems, was blocked by the understanding that the client is returning after 2-3 months in any case. But it was still necessary to control the especially greedy.
Omni-intersection scheme The
second aspect - it was necessary to fix the network standards and convey them to everyone. If earlier it was “you have to clean the store because it’s cool when the store is shining”, now it has become difficult to explain. Therefore, a standard appeared - "the store is shining." The explanation is simple: if it shines during the test - you personally receive a bonus. If it doesn’t shine, you don’t get it. The choice is yours.
We wrote checklists for stores (extremely simple, checking only unambiguous facts, for example, “here is a photo of the check”, “there was a price tag on the selected game”, “the door handle is clean”). And they gave them to mystery shoppers - these are people (each time different) who go to the store, make or not make a purchase as a real buyer, but all this time they check what and how. And they write a dialogue with the seller on the recorder. The same "Audiomania", it seems, uses the recording of all the dialogs in the store with a microphone system, but personally I would not go to that point. Therefore, only mystery shoppers.
The senior seller (point manager) and cashier sellers received their achievements. Each achievement is a bonus. “The amount of losses according to the results of inventories does not exceed 0.5% of the amount of goods turnover” - keep a thousand to the head and a bonus of 500 rubles to cashiers. At all checks clean - keep the premium. There were no violations on the TC (such as delays), buyers did not complain about the curved slow returns, and so on - keep the bonus.
The store manager gets a 15% premium for saving the company's financial resources (there are difficult conditions), 15% for low turnover (also difficult conditions, the script says), there are bonuses for all documents submitted on time, optimal schedules, compliance with the standards of dressing, uniforms and so on, for the safety of depreciable assets.
At the same time, they started firing for the jambs in the Labor Code and in cash discipline under the article. Previously, in mild cases, we limited ourselves “on our own,” but now it’s only hardcore. Because this is the best explanation that it is impossible.
The seller began to receive more or less? On average - about 15% more (results for 4 months). There were costs for mystery shoppers. Decreased management costs due to variance in decision making. There were costs for the introduction of new automation systems for calculating all of this (now part is still being reduced by hands). Total efficiency - we won from 10 to 20% of profit depending on the point. As they wrote to us in a negative review, "here you can earn only if you really work." Thanks for the compliment, you can’t say more precisely.
We singled out one senior point, which went shopping and taught the elders to live - we get the deputy head of retail. He wrote a huge cart how to work as a salesman, who is now at the heart of training. If interested, I can post reviews of specific stores so that it is clear how we straightened out the whole story in steps.
A couple of times we came across cases of slavish thinking. "Everything is bad at my point, because ..." - and then the reasons. The office does not give money to fix the air conditioning, the office does not give money for the necessary outdoor advertising, another reason, another reason, and so on. The senior stores really did not understand that if they are responsible for the point, then there are no worthy external reasons to work poorly. The internal rule - you see the cant - say it. If you don’t decide, speak louder.
If you have a job, there are no external circumstances. As in the army, a fighter is obliged to achieve compliance with any available means. The elders continued to whine that they have poor traffic, the country is in crisis and generally. A couple of times changed the senior points. The result is obvious - strong seniors proved that in 1-2 weeks you can increase sales by 30% simply by working inside the store and with sellers. They organized a competition among stores - who shows the best results for the month (in terms of sales composition and ratings of work quality) - it takes a day to relax, and the retail management for a full shift falls in their place.
The results were very pleasing. The theory “we have a special place” was broken.
Further, the introduction of motivation with “everything depends on you” and the implementation of the plan made the elders seriously think about where the plan comes from and how to implement it. When it became their prize, suddenly there was an opportunity to kick the office every morning with letters and calls “where is our sign, why are you, AT ALL?”, When the installer from AXO did not arrive on time, a letter was written to the founder - in general, exemplary chaos and suddenly reviving eyes.
There were problems with the fact that we partially lost the culture of games in the store. I went to the points and watched the same picture - they explain the game to the person in a box (and the box is in the seller’s hands) instead of opening and showing it. Retrained sellers, and set up tables for games. Now, almost all points can be visited just to sit and play (there was a couple left without tables, for example, on Tula). It was especially difficult to coordinate this in Mega. In two shopping centers, the administration called us almost immediately and said that your sellers were playing at work. Open games and play. They asked to stop this disgrace.
That's all for now. Refactor other parts of the company. And in retail there is still much to do, it’s not too early to relax.
Let's start with this picture. On Kursk near the point homeless people wound up. And they became the face of the company for several days. The elder did not know what to do, and wanted to consult with a lawyer. In our "good old" model, he would first do something with them, and then he would tell.
Homeless people lived near the store for a couple of weeks. This is a direct exit from the metro, so they were warm and comfortable there. It was decided that as soon as the door opened, the employee took thick rubber gloves, and either directly brought them out to the street, or had a conversation with him about why they interfere. If they had time to lie down for at least 2 minutes, that would suit them perfectly. And when they didn’t give 10 seconds, well, the direction of migration has shifted.
In fact, of course, this was the lesser of the problems. And the most easily solved.
Components
For the store to work, you need to do three basic things:
A. Choose a location. A good place is when the store goes to zero due to the conversion of the stream, and everything else already depends on how you attract new people. In places we have good competence, but there were problems with franchisees partners. Specifically, despite the described methodology and testing according to formal criteria, they several times at the beginning of 2017 managed to choose places where we ourselves would never get up. These are either really sweet spots with too high rents, or places in shopping centers where everything is good in the forecast numbers, but in practice, there’s some kind of dead end at the end of the floor. Each place is now checked according to the new procedure with special care.
B. Track assortment. In short, there were two hypotheses:
- The first is that if there is no product, then sellers replace it with some probability. That is, in the absence of goods by N thousand rubles per year of revenue, we lose (N * k), where k <1, for example, 0.8N.
- The second one is that if there is no product, then we lose the same amount, plus we also lose all the goods of the checks that were not bought with this product, plus we lose the following purchases. Plus the reputation of a place where there is everything at once. My estimate was about 2N losses.
The first works great in consumer demand such as grocery. Or when the same washing powder is replaced. The problem is that we only had data sets of this type. Now we know that the second scenario works for us. So, in 2017 it was necessary to restore the range, and do it pretty quickly.
And the assortment was a mess. Previously, the buyer simply took the goods and dragged them to the company, carrying out some input filtering. During the crisis, buyers have acquired an excellent skill to take everything that they think will be profitable to sell. As a result, we even got electric scooters. In the top sales for one of the months came a fidget cube. It became unclear what exactly we are selling. At the same time, many positions of hardcore desktops were not purchased, because suppliers, for example, put priority on margins, and not on the quality of the goods. And this is not the only reason.
Normal guys have an assortment manager - a person who decides what to buy accurately, even if there is no advantageous position in the market, and what exactly cannot be taken, even if it is three times gold. There was such a post. I would also talk about this separately, there is a whole world with its own special atmosphere.
We have got quite a lot of competitors on the Internet with low prices. We could contrast them with efficiency on huge volumes - with the same taxes we have strictly. The result is a revision of prices for key goods for which there are additional purchases in the same check - at Monopoly, for example, we earn almost nothing.
B. The third component of the store is normal service.Normal is when you left the store in a better mood than you entered. Even if you didn’t buy it. This is when the seller is not poher. This is when they open you fucking boxes. This is when they help a person, and not vparivat. This is the foundation of the basics.
Now cynicism
And we also hired Inessa to manage retail. Inessa is a terminator person. All the sellers hated her amicably. Why? Because she began to clean up. From her we learned the scale of the fluffy polar fox that was going on in retail.
One of the episodes: Karina and Inessa hired a man who had been calculating casino and bar schemes all his life. He could say for 10 minutes watching the bartender how much he steals per shift. And this beautiful guy drove through all our points for the purpose of economic intelligence. The report was impressive: after it, you could safely lose faith in people. From examples - once sellers scored on a client and sat in the back room in a crowd at rush hour. Someone was stealing. In Yekaterinburg, signals came that sellers were leaving earlier than the end of the shift. We put video surveillance. The eldest and three sellers immediately quit. We were in cognitive dissonance, because the scope of operations and the number of people employed in them was amazing. Having appreciated the scale of what is happening, we began a great purge.
It was impossible to take and surrender to the labor market those who were pierced. But such micromanagement smacks of dangerous idiocy and nepotism. It was much better to build an ecosystem that would automatically select the right sellers. Since we still changed the management of retail and processes (let me remind you, we divided from one large company into a group of companies by directions), there was an opportunity to change the working scheme of stores. Specifically - motivation.
People generally go to work either for money to eat, or because it's cool there. “Cool” can be of three types and rests against the Maslow pyramid, which is already specifically rumpled from frequent use. Well, or the theory of characters of players from gamification.
The old payment scheme was as follows: 2/3 of the salary is a salary, about a third are bonuses for sales (collective, shift). This worked great while the control chain was short, and we could visit our stores at least once a month. A few years later it turned out that few people understood how salaries are generally considered. And if it is not clear how salary is considered, then it is not clear how work affects it. Therefore, the new scheme is as follows:
- Fixed salary for hours actually worked.
- Bonuses from 1 to 7% of the final price of the goods. All items sold in the store during the day are counted. All bonuses earned per day are divided among all store employees in proportion to the hours worked.
- Increasing or decreasing coefficient for bonuses, depending on the development of the plan by the store. For example, with sales from 80 to 90 percent of the plan, the ratio is 1, and with sales of more than 110% of the plan - 1.7. With a coefficient of 1, bonuses amount to approximately 25-40% of the seller’s salary.
- There is also a block of awards for specific goals, about them below.
While it is important that if you are a seller, then your salary directly depends on how efficiently the store as a whole works and the change of seller.
After two weeks of screaming and moaning and a chain of dismissals on our own, we sincerely surprised to learn that they were still stealing from us. And not only goods, but also time. Specifically - it often happened that the senior "checked" the seller on schedule, but he did not go out. But he received a salary during this time.
Our decision then was extremely banal - coordination of schedules on the central retail node. So, as we know from network architecture, this idea with the growth of the network becomes complete garbage. We have become. The new scheme made it possible to shift the decision to the senior seller of the point, and so that he simply can not choose an ineffective solution - this is his money! This automatically meant that if 4 sellers came to replace Mega on Monday, they would all suck their paws, because there were very few buyers at that time. And if 2 sellers take the shift on Saturday, then again everyone will suck their paw, because the store could make more sales on the stream, but did not reach the percentage of the plan. This ecological balance at first seemed very fragile to us, but tests showed that people quickly learn to count their money.
Another problem could arise - the propensity for tactics instead of strategy. That is, the desire to steam, it seems, was blocked by the understanding that the client is returning after 2-3 months in any case. But it was still necessary to control the especially greedy.
Omni-intersection scheme The
second aspect - it was necessary to fix the network standards and convey them to everyone. If earlier it was “you have to clean the store because it’s cool when the store is shining”, now it has become difficult to explain. Therefore, a standard appeared - "the store is shining." The explanation is simple: if it shines during the test - you personally receive a bonus. If it doesn’t shine, you don’t get it. The choice is yours.
We wrote checklists for stores (extremely simple, checking only unambiguous facts, for example, “here is a photo of the check”, “there was a price tag on the selected game”, “the door handle is clean”). And they gave them to mystery shoppers - these are people (each time different) who go to the store, make or not make a purchase as a real buyer, but all this time they check what and how. And they write a dialogue with the seller on the recorder. The same "Audiomania", it seems, uses the recording of all the dialogs in the store with a microphone system, but personally I would not go to that point. Therefore, only mystery shoppers.
The senior seller (point manager) and cashier sellers received their achievements. Each achievement is a bonus. “The amount of losses according to the results of inventories does not exceed 0.5% of the amount of goods turnover” - keep a thousand to the head and a bonus of 500 rubles to cashiers. At all checks clean - keep the premium. There were no violations on the TC (such as delays), buyers did not complain about the curved slow returns, and so on - keep the bonus.
The store manager gets a 15% premium for saving the company's financial resources (there are difficult conditions), 15% for low turnover (also difficult conditions, the script says), there are bonuses for all documents submitted on time, optimal schedules, compliance with the standards of dressing, uniforms and so on, for the safety of depreciable assets.
At the same time, they started firing for the jambs in the Labor Code and in cash discipline under the article. Previously, in mild cases, we limited ourselves “on our own,” but now it’s only hardcore. Because this is the best explanation that it is impossible.
The seller began to receive more or less? On average - about 15% more (results for 4 months). There were costs for mystery shoppers. Decreased management costs due to variance in decision making. There were costs for the introduction of new automation systems for calculating all of this (now part is still being reduced by hands). Total efficiency - we won from 10 to 20% of profit depending on the point. As they wrote to us in a negative review, "here you can earn only if you really work." Thanks for the compliment, you can’t say more precisely.
More things
We singled out one senior point, which went shopping and taught the elders to live - we get the deputy head of retail. He wrote a huge cart how to work as a salesman, who is now at the heart of training. If interested, I can post reviews of specific stores so that it is clear how we straightened out the whole story in steps.
A couple of times we came across cases of slavish thinking. "Everything is bad at my point, because ..." - and then the reasons. The office does not give money to fix the air conditioning, the office does not give money for the necessary outdoor advertising, another reason, another reason, and so on. The senior stores really did not understand that if they are responsible for the point, then there are no worthy external reasons to work poorly. The internal rule - you see the cant - say it. If you don’t decide, speak louder.
If you have a job, there are no external circumstances. As in the army, a fighter is obliged to achieve compliance with any available means. The elders continued to whine that they have poor traffic, the country is in crisis and generally. A couple of times changed the senior points. The result is obvious - strong seniors proved that in 1-2 weeks you can increase sales by 30% simply by working inside the store and with sellers. They organized a competition among stores - who shows the best results for the month (in terms of sales composition and ratings of work quality) - it takes a day to relax, and the retail management for a full shift falls in their place.
The results were very pleasing. The theory “we have a special place” was broken.
Further, the introduction of motivation with “everything depends on you” and the implementation of the plan made the elders seriously think about where the plan comes from and how to implement it. When it became their prize, suddenly there was an opportunity to kick the office every morning with letters and calls “where is our sign, why are you, AT ALL?”, When the installer from AXO did not arrive on time, a letter was written to the founder - in general, exemplary chaos and suddenly reviving eyes.
There were problems with the fact that we partially lost the culture of games in the store. I went to the points and watched the same picture - they explain the game to the person in a box (and the box is in the seller’s hands) instead of opening and showing it. Retrained sellers, and set up tables for games. Now, almost all points can be visited just to sit and play (there was a couple left without tables, for example, on Tula). It was especially difficult to coordinate this in Mega. In two shopping centers, the administration called us almost immediately and said that your sellers were playing at work. Open games and play. They asked to stop this disgrace.
That's all for now. Refactor other parts of the company. And in retail there is still much to do, it’s not too early to relax.